Friday, 28 July 2006

“The root causes of youth crime and antisocial behaviour need to be tackled first, before we focus on the symptoms and attribute blame,” [1] says Ms Pamela Pollock in a letter to The Guardian. One might wonder whether a lady of her kind would do nothing to remove a dog from her leg until she had first determined the reasons for its randiness.

One will sometimes hear a feminist opine that she is just one more outraged woman struggling to be heard, but this strikes me as humbug; for, in my experience, an outraged woman need not struggle to this end; it comes naturally.

It is surprisingly rare to find atheism taken in earnest, even amongst self-professed atheists. More common is to find an airy sub-species of atheism that is keen to stress its own consolations. Consider the words of Mary Warnock, for instance, who in response to the question, “What happens to us when we die?”, replies: “We disappear from existence. But that doesn’t mean that we disappear from other people’s minds and hearts” [1].

.....If we are mortal, then we shall indeed disappear from existence, and the memories of us in other people’s minds will not constitute our continued existence, for such is a feeble consolation based on an equivocation; moreover, even the memories of us will one day fade to nothing.

.....For whom does Baroness Warnock believe these conclusions are too stark that they require the soft edges of fluff? For herself or for her readers?

Thursday, 20 July 2006

Many used to fear the seemingly ineluctable march of Prussianism, that “despotism of officials”, as Lord Salisbury called it, by which society is stifled under the weight of bureaucratic regulation in service to the state. As it turns out, the state of Prussia itself, along with the Second Reich, did not achieve nearly so great a degree of state-intrusion as some of its after-comers have managed, including our own democracy.

.....Few now fear such intrusion; for most are inured to it, or even demand it, as though it were an essential part of life, without which they would lose their orientation. With the rise of democracy, where “identification of the State with society has been redoubled” [1], the threshold has been raised, and we may now fear something of a higher order, namely, totalitarianism. “We should make it impossible to separate society from state” [2], says Neal Lawson of The Guardian, doing a passable impression of Benito Mussolini of Il Popolo d’Italia. “Through its radical democratisation,” says Mr Lawson, “and the involvement of citizens and public sector workers as co-creators of its services, we can have a popular state”— or, as Karl Kraus put it, “the permission to be everyone’s slave”. [3]

.....

[1] Murray N. Rothbard, “The Anatomy of the State”, Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays (Auburn: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000), p.55.

It seems no western intellectual comes to espouse cultural relativism except through an ulterior ideological motive, as is revealed in the exercise of his moral rationale: custom is reason enough, except when that custom is ours, in which case it is no reason at all.

Monday, 3 July 2006

It is good to spend an hour or two wondering how many of the faults and follies of the world have arisen and flourished because of the desperate attempt by fools to eschew what they believe fools believe.